All countries in the industrialized world now require some type of oversight to ensure that environmental impacts caused by proposed projects are mitigated in compliance with local, state and federal environmental laws. New international agreements (e.g. the Kyoto Protocol on global warming) set global standards for pollution abatement and resource use, and the number and complexity of environmental regulations will only increase in years to come. Nevertheless, the project planning, evaluation and review process as currently practiced (including environmental permitting), is fragmented, adversarial and ineffective. The documents are costly and time-consuming to prepare and distribute. The information generated is disparate, poorly visualized, and does not support the identification and development of optimum project alternatives. Partly as a consequence of these difficulties, the process generally fails to prevent degradation of the environment on and around the project site. Furthermore, once it has been gathered the information developed about the project is usually unavailable for later reference, even by related projects of similar type or location.
For example, in the United States, the environmental review and evaluation process currently consists of preparing a detailed paper report containing written descriptions of various project elements including the project setting, project alternatives and estimated impacts and mitigations. Information related to setting and impacts (e.g. traffic, air quality, utility capacity, biological resources, socioeconomic effects etc.) is provided in narrative form or through the use of tables or printed diagrams and photographs. The report is difficult to understand and can exceed one thousand (1,000) pages in length for larger projects. It is usually mailed to affected parties and key stakeholders, as well as filed at libraries or other government sites for public review. Written comments from stakeholders and comments received at public meetings are responded to in writing by the project proposer. At the end of this process, the regulatory body with jurisdictional authority approves or rejects the project based on all collected information, including the public comment and the proposer's response. The process as currently practiced is flawed and ineffective in a number of significant ways, including the following described below.
First, the process of preparing and publishing voluminous paper reports is time-consuming and costly and uses significant amounts of paper and other resources. Long paper-based reports are often incomplete and lack accurate or adequate information about one or more site characteristics or impacts. Neither paper-based reports nor text-based representations of such reports distributed on CD or on the Internet are readily reviewed in a collaborative manner by effected stakeholders, and they do not facilitate extensive searching, integrated evaluation of project impacts, or modeling of future site conditions.
Second, two-dimensional paper reports do not represent key features of the setting or the project in such a way that reviewers (including the general public) can adequately visualize the site or project impacts. Socioeconomic information in particular is not well related either causally or spatially to physical impacts, nor is such non-physical information well represented, to the detriment of a full understanding of the project and its impacts. In fact, much time is spent in the process of preparing text and graphics in an attempt to describe three-dimensional effects.
Third, internal and external stakeholders are not able to quickly receive, track, evaluate and respond to comments. During the review process, project sponsors or their lead agencies must respond to formal comments submitted by affected stakeholders. Even when these comments have been obtained electronically, there does not yet exist a method of cataloging, tallying, sorting or organizing comments according to keywords or areas of concern or acknowledging these comments upon receipt, adding to the time and cost of the response process. There is also no means of allowing commentors to contact one another or to immediately access similar comments made by other stakeholders.
Fourth, there is not a method for identifying and obtaining consensus about criteria with which to evaluate project alternatives and a means of tabulating stakeholder preferences. The criteria used by various reviewers and stakeholders in evaluating the project is nowhere explicitly identified, such that misunderstanding about such criteria becomes a significant barrier to communication about project alternatives and slows down the project implementation process.
Fifth, there is not a method for modeling the integrated effect of various project changes, predicting the collective impacts and representing the resulting future condition of a site. Project reviewers cannot readily determine the impact of alternatives not already identified by the proposer, nor can the proposer easily identify project features required to limit project impacts. In general, the current state of the art has not included capabilities that might accurately predict the total outcome likely to follow a proposed project (forecasting) or the type of project required to produce a given outcome (backcasting).
Sixth, there is not an ability to efficiently publish, store or distribute data contained in environmental documents for future reference. Once the review process is complete (i.e. the project has been approved or rejected), all paper-based information is only accessible by obtaining the final documents and manually locating the data in the appropriate section. Although environmental information is continuously being developed in specific locations for particular projects, there is no method currently in place for the efficient storage and distribution of this information, such that even proposers of projects in the same location must recreate data from scratch. The inefficiencies of the project review process are even more apparent in the case of environmental management, where efforts at regional environmental planning are hampered by the lack of coordinated relevant environmental information.
Present improvements in the “state of the art” with respect to project representation and publication includes distribution of environmental reports on compact disc (CD) or through the internet, either as a photograph of a document or in undifferentiated text format. Visualization techniques have been used for managing individual construction projects (Fischer, 1997); modeling and visualization of traffic impacts (Shiffer, 1996); and modeling and visualization of land use trends in support of municipal general plans (Orr, 1998). In addition, decision support software currently available allows a group of individuals to identify and assign different values to criteria that can then be applied to various alternatives for the purpose of determining the most popular option. However, these techniques have never been integrated into a single program on an interactive platform suitable for use in the practice of environmental planning and management, and project planners and environmental stakeholders rarely utilize them.
An even greater limitation results from the lack of a method of communicating and archiving information for future reference. Recent attempts at creating an archive have been limited to an online summary of environmental documentation received within given state jurisdiction (State of California Office of Planning and Research, 2000). However, as yet there does not exist an efficient and cost-effect means of publishing, storing and distributing environmental information that could accommodate and provide easy access to geographic, physical and socioeconomic data to support regional environmental planning and management efforts.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a method for preparing and presenting an environmental project document in a cost-effective efficient manner that can easily be viewed and commented on by stakeholders. It is further desirable to provide a method for obtaining consensus information from stakeholders and modeling the integrated effects of various project changes. It is also further desirable to provide a method for efficiently publishing, storing, retrieving and distributing environmental project documents and included environmental information.